Coupling of Surface Plasmon Polaritons and Hyperbolic Phonon Polaritons on the Near-Field Radiative Heat Transfer Between Multilayer Graphene/hBN Structures

ABSTRACT

Near-field radiative heat transfer (NFRHT) between multilayer graphene/hBN heterostructures has been demonstrated to exceed the blackbody limit due to the coupling mechanism of surface plasmon polaritons and hyperbolic phonon polaritons, opening the door to applications in thermal management, thermophotovoltaics, and nanoscale metrology. Recent studies have shown that adding vacuum layers within multilayer structures can effectively promote surface modes and thus enhance NFRHT. However, the influence of vacuum layers on NFRHT between multilayer graphene/hBN heterostructures has not been investigated. Moreover, the influence of vacuum layers on coupled resonance modes excited in multilayer structures is worth discussing. In this work, we study the NFRHT based on multilayer graphene/vacuum/hBN/vacuum structures. The results show that as the gap distance increases from 20 nm to 100 nm, the NFRHT of three-cell and six-cell configurations is enhanced, while that of unit-cell configuration is suppressed. The potential mechanism can be identified as the excitation of surface plasmon-phonon polaritons (SPPPs) and hyperbolic plasmon-phonon polaritons (HPPPs) in multilayer structures. The enhancement factor of the six-cell configurations is up to 4.82 when the gap distance is 80 nm. Moreover, the influences of the chemical potential of graphene and the layer thickness on the NFRHT are discussed. The interesting results in this work indicate the perspectives for future near-field research involving coupling of SPPPs and HPPPs, and shed new light on high-performance devices introducing vacuum layers based on near-field radiative heat transfer.

KEYWORDS:

• Near-field radiative heat transfer
• surface plasmon-phonon polaritons
• hyperbolic plasmon-phonon polaritons
• multilayer structure
• vacuum layer

Acknowledgments

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (52106099), the Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province (ZR2022YQ57), and the Taishan Scholars Program.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Data will be made available on request.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [52106099]; Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province [ZR2022YQ57]; Taishan Scholars Program.